Paying an out-of-state vendor millions of dollars to do what the State Auditor’s Office can do at a fraction of the cost — literally about five cents on the dollar — isn’t efficient: It’s a waste of your tax dollars.

Iowans love pie — me included. My favorite is strawberry rhubarb.

Local governments also love a different kind of PIE — that’s short for Public Innovations and Efficiencies. It’s a program I launched in 2019 that encourages counties, cities, and school districts to use innovation and common sense to save tax dollars. About 500 local governments around the state participate in PIE every year by creating strategies to save money and make government more efficient. We call their ideas “PIE recipes.” They’ve included food rescue programs, teleconferencing policies that reduce travel costs, and systems to capture and sell the methane gas produced by landfills.

One of the things I like most about the PIE recipes — they aren’t canned. Like my mom’s strawberry rhubarb pie, they’re made with care and tailored to the people served. I know, because I’ve shared a lot of pie — the kind you eat — with hundreds of community leaders during my annual PIE Tours. They don’t like cookie-cutter mandates forced down their throats, any more than the legislation passed by the Reynolds administration that restricts their decisionmaking and undermines local autonomy, which is embedded in Iowa’s Constitution.

So, imagine how they might react to an out-of-state company hand-picking items from their budget, feeding it through Artificial Intelligence, and then telling them what to cut. Leaders in the Iowa House are already in discussions with Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based software company, and contemplating a multi-year contract that would cost taxpayers more than $4 million to create a tool to analyze the budgets of Iowa’s 99 counties and two-thirds of the state’s school districts.

First, getting the data needed to compare and analyze local government budgets isn’t a heavy lift. It’s publicly available through the Iowa Department of Management. My Office used it to review spending patterns by cities between fiscal years 2019 and 2021 on core government

services like public works, to determine how much a city might be over- or underspending compared to similarly sized cities. Second, the proposal before lawmakers limits the budget analysis to counties and just twothirds of the state’s school districts. The Auditor’s Office can identify efficiencies for ALL local entities — every county, city, and school district. So, taxpayers get more while paying less.

Making government more efficient is why, for years, I’ve asked the legislature to expand the PIE program, but, like my proposal for mandatory jail time for public officials who steal from taxpayers, it’s gone nowhere because politics got in the way of common-sense policies.

At the end of the day, the legislature shouldn’t outsource its obligations, especially at a cost to taxpayers. They should use the tools in their own kitchen and give the people who know their communities best a place at the table in creating recipes for sustainable government efficiency.

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Democrat Rob Sand is the Iowa State Auditor

and a candidate for governor.